Security and Privacy in Molecular Communication and Networking: Opportunities and Challenges

International audienceMolecular Communication (MC) is an emerging andpromising communication paradigm for several multi-disciplinarydomains like bio-medical, industry and military. Differently to thetraditional communication paradigm, the information is encodedon the molecules, that are then used as carriers of information.Novel approaches related to this new communication paradigmhave been proposed, mainly focusing on architectural aspects andcategorization of potential applications. So far, security and privacyaspects related to the molecular communication systems havenot been investigated at all and represent an open question thatneed to be addressed. The main motivation of this paper lies onproviding some first insights about security and privacy aspects ofMC systems, by highlighting the open issues and challenges andabove all by outlining some specific directions of potential solutions.Existing cryptographicmethods and security approaches arenot suitable for MC systems since do not consider the pecific issuesand challenges, that need ad-hoc solutions.We will discuss directionsin terms of potential solutions by trying to highlight themain advantages and potential drawbacks for each direction considered.We will try to answer to the main questions: 1) why thissolution can be exploited in the MC field to safeguard the systemand its reliability? 2) which are the main issues related to the specificapproach